Master Email Marketing Like a Pro With These 10 Tips

Since the dawn of days, communication between people happened through written messages. From drawing on caves, notes carried by a dove, postcards delivered by a postman and now to the latest form of an email generated by a computer, we’ve certainly come a long way.

Workers in the US spend 6.3 hours a day checking their email. In basic math, that comes out to… a whole lot, right? Making sure your recipient got the message is more complex than ever! Your goal is to make sure your reader is engaged and ultimately, heading over to your website.

Speaking of website, if you own a small business, you must be online. You can easily create a stunning website for free and use it to promote your craft. But that’s only the first step on the road to success; you’ll need to drive quality traffic of the right audience. Email marketing gives you access to a reader’s most personal space, making it the most efficient source of communication out there.

In order to achieve the title of The Inbox Master, here are 10 tips you should know:

1. Judge an email by its subject line

The subject line of your email is the first thing your recipient sees. That powerful line will either lead them to open your mail or take it out to trash.

Want to know what to avoid when it comes to subject lines? We’ll touch on that a bit later – it’s worth the wait!

Inspirational tip: Take a look through your own inbox, note which subject line catches your eye and mimic that style.

2. Make your design beautiful and functional

Designing a great email means choosing the right color scheme, selecting the perfect fonts and including high-quality photos. But in order to create engagement, there are few elements you need to be mindful of:

Call-to-action buttons: Place them in a visible place, and make them stand out.

Links: The best practice is to have only one link (you can use more if necessary). Try to include it in a button rather than as a text link.

Content: Best to use one subject per email and to be as direct as possible.

Image: Include an image that emphasizes your email’s content. High quality is recommended but be weary of images that are too heavy; it’s a shame to have a beautiful image that doesn’t load.

Font: Make sure to pick a readable font, the Serif family is often the most appropriate. Dying to learn more? We’ve got the best practices for font-usage laid out here.

3. Don’t make them wait long

The average attention span of a person is eight seconds, which means you really need your email to be short and sweet.

For example:

4. Time it to show that you care

Your recipients should feel as if they are your only client. In order to do so, you need to schedule some of your emails in order to provide that feeling of exclusivity. Consider creating a content calendar to ensure you’re prepared for upcoming holidays and events. Who doesn’t love receiving a birthday email? Especially if you include a special coupon inside :)

Personalization tip: Address your email recipient by their first name and if you can, include your own name when signing off.

5. Read This Now!

Are you still reading this? Good! That means our call-to-action (aka CTA) worked. If you want people to complete an action, you need to explicitly ask for it. The more options we get, the fewer actions we take. If you have ONE strong CTA, your website’s traffic will spike. CTAs like: “Sign Up for Free,” “Buy Now,” or “Claim Your Free Trial,” are classic examples that work.

Design Tip: Create a CTA with a colorful background; red, green and orange work best. Get more advice on creating the perfect CTA here.

6. Prepare for a safe landing (page)

You would think that the most obvious destination to direct your call to action would be to your homepage, right? Wrong. Your beautiful main page is full of information that may not even be relevant to the specific email you’ve just sent. Your job, as an email creator, is to make the lives of your recipients super easy. An accurate destination is the best solution for your TMI (too much information) situation.

7. Your content is king

Content can be a queen as well! As long as it’s relatable, fresh and approachable. One of the secrets for creating great content is understanding your target audience and adjusting your writing style accordingly:

Write as if you’re speaking to them, keep it down to earth and appropriate.

Try to avoid using technical terms that they might not be aware of. If it’s a must, attach an explanation right after (like we did in tip #5 with CTAs!)

Less is more.

Be consistent in your tone throughout your emails, in order to maintain professionalism.

8. Research is your key to success

Knowing who your customers are is the key to knowing your business. In order to learn who’s on the receiving end of your emails, you’ll need to do some research to understand what their interests are, where they’re located, as well as details like their gender and age.

Not sure how to go about gathering this information? There are few programs to help you analyze your readership; we recommend Google Analytics.

There are different email metrics and statistics you’ll need to follow in order to master the art of sending the best emails. The name of the game is experimentation! Play around with your subject lines, CTAs and the time you send your emails out; the ability to send an email at the right time will either make or break its performance. Figure out which time of day and which days of the week work best for your audience and optimize your schedule accordingly.

9. Set it and forget it

Now that you’ve become an expert of sending the perfect email, there is another tool that can help you become the master of it all!

“Automated Emails” is a service Wix provides you, so you’ll never forget to send a generic email to your recipients when needed. How does this work, you ask? You can set an email that will be triggered to be delivered in common cases, such as:

10. Help me! I need your bank account number to send you money

You should know by now, this subject is a trap. The goal of your email is ultimately to get the open and click through to your site or landing page, but spammers beware! In some cases, your email may not even make it into their inbox. Spam is our worst enemy, but there are some ways you can avoid being sent to the folder of fatality:

Avoid subject lines that contain words like congratulations, free, cancel at any time. If you’re offering a buy one, get one free promotion, be conscious of your tone so your recipient knows you’re not a scammer.

DON’T WRITE AN EMAIL IN ALL CAPS, especially your subject line.

Don’t use misleading subject lines like adding RE: when it’s not actually a reply email. Because that’s just shady, right?